Newbie saying hello

I'm new to this forum but not to in-car PCs. Just thought I should introduce myself and share my experiences...

My name is Darryl. I live in England, UK in the lovely county of Buckinghamshire.

I put my first EPIA mini-itx PC in my Ford Mondeo about 18 months ago. It was a bit hit and miss - At first I just tried running it from the car battery through the DC-DC converter in the Morex 2699 case - without much luck.

The biggest problem was getting reliable juice to the hard disk - I was (and still am) using a 3.5 inch 160Gb maxtor Diamondmax 9. My initial solution was to use a 12volt regulated switch-mode power supply I purchased from RS.

This was fine until I wanted to upgrade from the EIPA 800 to the Nehemia M1000. It just wouldn't boot up.

Last week I bought a new car - the Vauxhall Zafira - no idea what it might be called in the states. It's a seven seater estate car (station wagon?) where the rear most seats fold flat into the floor to create a very large boot space when needed.

I decided I wanted my car pc a little better installed in this one - the mondeo had wires visible in the passenger footwell, input was performed with an ATI all-in-wonder RF remote control and the PC itself just sat on the floor under the driver's seat.

This time I wanted it all: Touch screen control, sat nav, dvd playback - the lot. Obviously for decent DVD playback I needed the Nehemia M10000 or the new MII motheboard - thankfully I still had two of the M10000's lying about from previous experiments.

So I set about doing this properly - I purchased a purpose built car PSU from www.linitx.com and a touchscreen 7" lcd display and slot load dvd drive from www.mini-itx.com.

Since the PSU doesn't fit in the morex case, I needed an alternative case. Luckily the Zafira has a tray underneath the front passenger seat - presumably for putting litter in. It turned out to be just the right size to fit the lot in (apart from the LCD display of course - which is mounted over the cup holders in the bottom of the centre console). Now the whole thing is out of sight and starts automatically 10 seconds after the ignition is turned on.

Shame you didn't know about the Carnetix CNX-P1260, it might have worked in your situation, as it works in conjunction with the power supply within the Morex case, and gives you the same functions as the Opus. Of course if you're using more than 55W of power then the Opus is the only way forward

You really should sign up to the Digital Car forums and come along to our UK meet on Sunday 26th September!